Monday, March 30, 2015

The Deadline is not Monday

Well, this was bound to happen at some point: I did not finish my game for this week! That's not exciting, but it does give me some time to think about why I ran out of time. Honestly, the answer is pretty clear: I should not have spent so much time trying to create my own character controller.

I had a lot planned for this week's game: I was going to make an infinitely scrolling level made of a three-tiered box-spawning system (easy). I was going to make enemies which re-position themselves (easy) and which fire attacks at the player which the player can deflect back at their enemies with a well-placed attack (tricky, but doable). The player was also going to be able to melee-attack these enemies (possibly tricky) and each time the player killed an enemy, the infinite scroll would increase speed (easy again). The player's movement would be simple: I'd just code jumping and moving one square left and right, and the infinite scroll would take care of the illusion of movement.

In retrospect... Yeah, I may have bitten off more than I could chew. But what really killed me was that whole "simple" movement system. I did not use Unity's character controller, and ended up not choosing a very elegant way of moving the character around. I began work on the game Thursday, and within a few hours I had player movement completed. I then created the infinite scroll of boxes, and immediately found that my movement system just immediately brought the player to the top of whatever box they collided with. I continued to work on issues with player movement until... Sunday morning. I believed I could tie the game up in a day after I had movement settled. Well, it's 3:00am Monday morning, and I'm calling it: no game this week. Tough noogies, but success is a poor teacher anyway.

One of my rules with this blog is to submit something to the blog before going to bed Sunday night (or Monday morning in this case). Another rule is to do a new game every week. This game never quite got off the ground, but I think the concept is sound... Maybe I'll start it up from scratch in some future week and see how it goes the second time through.